


Celestial Navigation

by linman



Series: Tenebrae [8]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-02
Updated: 2010-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:45:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alone in England, Giles evaluates his course of action.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Celestial Navigation

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the Tenebrae series, but can be read as a standalone.

**Celestial Navigation**

by L. Inman

 

Rupert Giles was a bit tired of being drunk.

            Not that it didn’t have some benefits—after all, it killed time (he was not over and above enamored of time even when he had his head above water), and dulled his senses; and on particularly bad nights he had reflected that it could even get him killed, which was drastic but dimly attractive.

            The problem was that it was boring.

            He’d spent a week on his return to England getting thoroughly pissed up every night, and sometimes every afternoon as well, and it was beginning to pale.  He had even varied it with confrontations with one friend or another, about this or that—but that wasn’t the sort of thing one wanted dutch courage for, since it was straight cowardice to begin with.

            Perhaps that was the problem, he thought as he put on water for tea.  Having committed himself to a course of cowardice, he was in very little need of anesthetic for the pain of slogging on in fear.  After years of putting his face to the north wind and fighting forward step by step, turning his back on the pressure and letting it carry him the other direction had a certain weightless charm.  Why was he dulling it with drink?

            There was an obvious answer to that, but he ignored it.

            An official-looking letter lay on his hall table, with the conspicuous lack of direction or letterhead on sumptuous paper that was the hallmark of the Council.  He had swiped it assiduously that morning with the featherduster along with the rest of the flat.  As far as he was concerned, it could lie there, unopened, till Doomsday.  He was dimly surprised at the savageness of this thought, and of other thoughts he’d found surfacing between bottles.  It was beginning to make him wonder if those flashes of resentment he’d felt over the years had really been so anomalous as he’d pretended.  Were they merely the remnants of adolescent rebellion, or were they indexed to something real?

            He suspected he was here to find out.

            He poured steaming water over his teabag, in a mug he’d owned for years now, a colorful pottery mug without a handle.  It was ritual without any irritating paranormal overtones:  dunking the bag for four mindless minutes, pinching it dry and shaking the stinging heat off the fingers before tossing the bag in the bin, stirring in milk and sugar, taking that first tiny half-scalding sip before carrying the mug to his brand-new easy chair and settling down.

            Once he’d gotten over the summer’s dread-soaked packing-and-unpacking process, it had been relatively easy to give in to the nesting impulse:  looking about him now, he found himself in utterly familiar and comfortable surroundings:  old art on new walls, old bookshelves in a new corner, old rug on a new floor.  The only thing new in the room was the easy chair, plush and deep and pleasantly modern; he had given the old one, scarred from battles that had raged their way into his home, to Xander.

            Weapons chest near to hand by the foyer; books alphabetized in the cabinets; leftover spell ingredients in their drawers; talismans wrapped carefully in their trunk.

            Ready for whatever was next.

            But as far as he knew, nothing was next.  He had known that when he chose this place; had known it when he neglected to give it up when he went back to the States after Willow’s call.  Nothing was next, unless he chose to hang out his shingle as a demon-hunting Sherlock.

            Perhaps that had been his idea of a masking plan—to go freelance when he returned here, even if the pleasure the plan brought only glazed the surface of his suspended grief.

            He was ready for that plan, certainly.  He brought the mug to his lips for a long sip, eyes on his new den.  It had always, in fact, been his emergency backup plan.  The net he almost fell backward into any number of times—during the long, restless, miserable wait for Buffy to return from her self-imposed exile; after being cut off from the Council and then cutting himself free of his last obligation in Sunnydale; after any number of ridiculous escapades after which he came home to an empty and meaningless flat.  Always she had recalled him.  Always she had needed him.  Always he had craved a position in the vanguard, not quite at the front, not really in the back.

            Then she had died: a perfect time to put the emergency backup plan into effect.  The plan included stages that he had subliminally prepared beforehand: first the inward death and barrenness, then the removal to Avalon, then the gradual building of a freelance supernatural consulting practice.

            The plan which had crumbled like a dry scone even before Buffy’s resurrection.

            He blew across the surface of his tea, though it was no longer hot, and quaffed another long sip.  This was the thing that had stuck in his craw.  The plan was as useless as he had long felt himself to be—and then he had been called back to—to what?  Begin all over again?  Abandon his grief and his plan for surviving it, as if it had never been?  Submit to the vicious cycle of needing to be needed one more time?

            He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought this might very possibly be anger.  A deep vein of it.

            Well, he’d done it now: had chosen unabashed cowardice, was traveling with the wind instead of against it.  His eyes flicked to the foyer where he knew the Council letter was waiting, to the weapons chest, to the bookshelves stocked with evidence of his hard-won arcane expertise.

            What was an emergency backup plan good for?  It was a map drawn by oneself for a country one’s never seen.  The sort of map that led you to give your new country a name from the old, the sort of map that resulted in terming people Indians who’d never heard of India.

            And he had run before the wind, not to the west but to the east.

            He got up and took his tea over to the glass-fronted cabinet he had lugged all over the globe.  Opened the door and fingered the titles inside, sipping; then took out his copy of _Tables of Demon Risings, With Arithmantic Algorithms_.  He held it, firm and idle in his hand.  He was a retired Watcher, officially: what did he want with this now?  And what, especially, did he want with it ready to hand in his bookcase, when he had any number of rich literature titles inherited from his father languishing in storage?

            He turned and looked around the den again.  He could turn this inside out if he wanted, he thought: and it was like the sudden dissolving of a bind on his thoughts.  He could keep the occult books in storage, and the beautiful, delicious books on his shelves.  He could put the weapons in the closet and think about them as little as he chose.

            He could see it now, the new plan: could see himself packing up the books and putting them away....

            But that too seemed like an emergency backup plan.  And the emergency had come and gone.  He pictured the books malignantly waiting in the attic of his country house, along with every damn thing else he had not bothered to throw out when his father died.  Perhaps he should give them to the Council, let them fester in their library instead.  Probably be a lot of dups, though.  The Council would probably sell the dups and realize a nice little profit from his plan of retreat.

            He frowned, put the book back on the shelf and shut the cabinet door.  Cut his eyes back at the foyer where the letter lay.

            Why shouldn’t he be the one realizing the profit?

            _But no, now waitaminute_, a familiar voice in his head chimed in.  _Sell your books?  What about your promise to guard the knowledge?  What about staying prepared?  What if a call comes you can’t refuse to answer?  What about the mere security of possession?_

            He thought about what he’d do in some emergent occasion without his books.  He’d have to wing it, certainly.  He’d have to steer by the stars.

            The thought was oddly pleasing.

            The more he thought about it, the more it seemed an appropriate fuck-you to the past that had screwed him over more than once.  Certainly better than befuddling himself night after night: that was only a fuck-you to his liver.

            And this, this new plan, would leave him free rather than merely dead.

            He went to the kitchen and dumped out the remainder of his tea.  It spread in broad splatters across the sink and then drained away.  He ran the mug full of water, poured it out to rinse the sink, then ran it full again and left it there, with the last drops falling noisily onto the full surface.

            Without even sparing a glance for his liquor cabinet as he passed it, Rupert Giles went to bed, and slept deeply, and slept well.


End file.
